Darth Vader's menacingly iconic presence in Star Wars wouldn’t be complete without a voice that is recognizable worldwide. With actor James Earl Jones now retired, fans were left wondering who would fill these massive shoes and voice the dreaded Sith Lord in the latest franchise's TV series.
The answer was no one! That’s why Disney turned to Respeecher's voice cloning technology to restore Darth Vader’s original voice for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. With machine learning technology, we managed to create a clone of James Earl Jones’s voice, allowing Darth Vader to resume his role as the evil Sith Lord in all his glory.
The Project
On the other hand, it's not just James Earl Jones whose voice we cloned. Recently, the editor-in-chief of Dubbing Junkie (the largest Hungarian blog about localization) asked Respeecher to recreate the voice of Hungarian stage actor and dubbing star Lajos Kránitz. This iconic Hungarian voice actor dubbed Darth Vader for the Hungarian market for years before passing away in 2005. With this project, Respeecher gave Hungarians the opportunity to experience their original Darth Vader again in 2022.
„Respeecher’s technology enables Hungarian fans to once again hear and relive the legendary actor, Lajos Kránitz’s, voice in Hollywood-level quality. The outstanding results made hundreds of thousands of fans speechless.”
- Balázs Mónos, Editor in Chief at SzinkronJunkie (Dubbing Junkie)
The Solution
Respeecher went to work creating a version of Kránitz's voice. The result allows Hungarian fans to watch the series and hear the legendary actor's voice as if he were still alive today.
As always with restoration projects, we worked with archived Kránitz's speech records to create the actor's voice model. A fun fact was that Kránitz's two sons worked on the Hungarian localization of the Kenobi series: one in the recording engineer position and the other as the dubbing director. The two were happy to provide Respeecher with written legal permission to clone Lajos Kránitz’s voice.
The project took around two weeks from beginning to end to complete the voice model. We’re usually able to complete this process sooner, but due to quality issues with the original voice samples used for ML training, restoration took a little longer to achieve the result the team was hoping for.
To reflect the professional qualities of the original performances (both in English and Hungarian), a professional voice actor was hired to re-record all the dialogues of the character.
Eventually, Respeecher created a voice model of exceptional quality despite having to work while a full-scale war with Russia was going on right outside our cities. To top it off, we included the effects on Darth Vader's unmistakable voice in the new and improved version of the character's dialog.
Here you can listen to the source voice and the result of voice conversion:
Source voice actor
Target voice of Lajos Kránitz’s
Source voice actor
Target voice of Lajos Kránitz’s
The Results
Reespeecher's voice cloning technology restored Darth Vader’s voice to his original glory for Disney+. The same technology was used to resurrect Hungarian dubbing star Lajos Kránitz's voice for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. This project is yet another testament to how far voice cloning technologies have come and how they continue to introduce new and exciting opportunities.
Moreover, the project's success has prompted new conversations in the Hungarian dubbing industry. After bringing back Lajos Kránitz's voice, the Hungarian press raised an important question: could Respeecher do the same for Károly Gesztesi? — another iconic voice actor that sadly passed away in January 2020 and could not dub the character Sullivan in Disney+'s animated series, Monsters at Work. A similar situation is likely for Shrek, as Dreamworks is already working on the fifth installment of the series.
„The Hungarian dubbing scene lost so much talent in the recent decades, and nobody would have thought that we might, one day, we can relive the fantastic wonder that these actors have created. With Respeecher’s outstanding AI technology, a truly cinema-ready experience can be recreated.”
- Balázs Mónos, Editor in Chief at SzinkronJunkie (Dubbing Junkie)
